The nation's largest criminal defense organization, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL) voted today that the Administration's rules for military tribunals make it ethically impossible for lawyers to participate in them.

"We took the position that it is unethical for a lawyer to represent a client under current conditions for military tribunals, and if a lawyer chose to do so, he or she must contest all of those unethical conditions," said Barry Scheck, the incoming president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The organization will issue the ethics statement to its 11,000 members. Lawyers are not legally bound by the organization's positions, but state bar associations sometimes adopt the same reasoning for their rules.

We voted for the resolution condemning the procedures. There was a long debate, at which numous facets of the issue were debated, but the bottom line was, almost all of us felt that these regulations posed the most dangerous threat to due process, justice and the mission of the legal profession that any of us had ever seen. Not only could we not accept the rules, most of us felt that the rules must be actively opposed.

The American Bar Association will be voting on the tribunal procedures at its annual meeting next week in San Francisco. As a member of the ABA Criminal Justice Section Council, we'll be at that meeting as well.

What's so bad about the rules contained in Military Commission Instruction No. 5? If it's not apparent from the rule, scroll down to Annex B and read the affidavit that civilian defense lawyers must sign to be allowed to participate.

Here's more with specifics of the objectionable provisions of the rule.